Rudyard Kipling"
“When you're left wounded on Afganistan's plains and
the women come out to cut up what remains, Just roll to your rifle
and blow out your brains,
And go to your God like a soldier”
General Douglas MacArthur"
“We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.”
“It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.” “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.
“The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.”
“May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .” “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
“Nobody ever defended, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
The Soldier stood and faced God
Which must always come to pass
He hoped his shoes were shining
Just as bright as his brass
"Step forward you Soldier,
How shall I deal with you?
Have you always turned the other cheek?
To My Church have you been true?"
"No, Lord, I guess I ain't
Because those of us who carry guns
Can't always be a saint."
I've had to work on Sundays
And at times my talk was tough,
And sometimes I've been violent,
Because the world is awfully rough.
But, I never took a penny
That wasn't mine to keep.
Though I worked a lot of overtime
When the bills got just too steep,
The Soldier squared his shoulders and said
And I never passed a cry for help
Though at times I shook with fear,
And sometimes, God forgive me,
I've wept unmanly tears.
I know I don't deserve a place
Among the people here.
They never wanted me around
Except to calm their fears.
If you've a place for me here,
Lord, It needn't be so grand,
I never expected or had too much,
But if you don't, I'll understand."
There was silence all around the throne
Where the saints had often trod
As the Soldier waited quietly,
For the judgment of his God.
"Step forward now, you Soldier,
You've borne your burden well.
Walk peacefully on Heaven's streets,
You've done your time in Hell."
Somewhere in eastern Asia, probably at Rangoon, members of the Unified Allied Supreme Command (see p. 17) met this week to make ready an Allied success. There a good man reported to his chief on one of the shortest, strangest and grimmest commands ever held by a British general.
The good man was General Sir Henry Royds Pownall, who only a fortnight earlier had become Britain's Far Eastern Commander. The shortness was no fault of his: he was promoted to be Chief of Staff in the Supreme Command. The grimness was Malaya's: half its tin mines in the hands of the Japs, one-sixth of its rubber plantations lost, Singapore threatened, all of its strategic and material riches poised as if under an auctioneer's mallet: going . . . going. . . .
The Supreme Command's first responsibility to the Allies would be to repair the Malayan damage and save Singapore. General Pownall's first responsibility to the Supreme Command was to describe Malaya's peril, with which he had had brief but concentrated acquaintance, and to recommend steps to be taken. The steps would have to be taken in haste, for the situation as he described it was alarming: on the west coast the Japanese were within 270 miles of Singapore, on the east coast within 175 miles.
Mammal Enemy. One cause of the jam, General Pownall reported, was that the Japs were as good as animals in the jungle. They came on in polygenetic clothes: in shorts and sneakers, or Malayan dress, or just their underwear. They forced natives to lead them through tangled byways. They pushed about with high, merry tail, like hunting dogs, sniffing out coveys of defenders. With their bare hands they made rafts of logs and rode down rivers such as the Perak. They stole bicycles, food and shoes from Malayans and Chinese, went forward faster, stronger and better shod than before. They grabbed barges at Penang, skimmed the coast and tried to make landings below British positions. They climbed in the trees and dropped, like monkeys, on passing patrols. Every hardship which a hungry animal could tolerate and many an in genuity it could not conceive, they experienced and used.
Typical of their desperate opportunism were the landings they made below British lines on the west coast—in waters which ought to have been British right to the bottom. When they took Penang intact, they gathered all the barges, junks, launches, yachts and sampans in sight and set off, like a Japanese print of a Strength Through Joy outing, down the coast. At the mouth of the Perak, near Telok Anson, they sent a large launch as a kind of decoy into the estuary. A British patrol boat approached to investigate. The Japanese strung a line of laundry on the boat, to give the impression of being on a pleasure cruise. When the British vessel got close by, the Japanese opened fire. Mean while the main Japanese flotilla proceeded 14 miles farther south, landed safely. Continued here....
